Answer
If you have used Windows NT for any length of time at all, you are probably familiar with what is fondly referred to as “The Blue Screen of Death,” or BSOD for short. The technical term for this phenomenon is the “stop screen” and it is displayed when the operating system has crashed (or hit a bug).
No application can cause the operating system to fail in this way. The BSOD is an indication that the kernel of the machine has reached a fault that cannot be corrected. Quite often this can be hardware related (e.g. hard disk failure, unterminated SCSI chain, etc.).
If you are fortunate, you may be able to simply cold boot, and pray the screen doesn’t come back. It is more likely however, that there is a real problem that needs to be fixed, or the screen will rear its ugly head on a regular basis.
When the BSOD occurs, write down the first 4 hexadecimal numbers. Proceed to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and search for them. Quite often a detailed explaination of what has happened will be available.
Keywords:blue screen crash windows trap failure